The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  Bridey might have detected the fib had not she been so eager to believe it. She brushed a whip of black hair behind an ear; there was no trace left of the facelift scar. Dr. Biff, that pompous schmuck, knew his business as well as Chernoff knew his. Bridey stood and from her cleavage fished a necklace off which dangled a key, and she used that key to unlock a safe embedded in the far wall. She returned with a thin sheaf of cash. Grover Cleveland gazed importantly from the topmost thousand-dollar bill.

  She tucked the money into my pocket. Explanation was not needed. Bridey had no cause to impede my Hollywoodization, particularly if it bound me to the one director who might realize her script. To her this was a double victory; every step I took into her bright, ageless future was a step away from the darkening yesteryears of Wilma Sue.

  Reader, look! Plot, subplots, characters, and theme—at last every one is conjoined.

  Buy a bag of peanuts, settle in.

  For here comes the twist.

  XII.

  CHERNOFF CONTINUED TO PLAY KING’S Man to my Humpty Dumpty, first darning Leather’s serving-fork puncture in my left forearm, next sanding away the flamethrower burns of my left biceps, and third reconstructing my grenade-blasted right thigh. With every peel, pickle, paste, and patch, I began to see myself, many decades the outsider, as resolutely, proudly American—no, as America itself, cobbled from foreign pieces the same as our grand country.

  Bridey was too busy to curb my immodesty. Nourished by our fruitful scandal, she labored like a sled dog, dragging her frazzled entourage from soundstage to soundstage, filming one role during the day and a second at night. After our Limey pals got their peckers crossed with those of Hitler’s Nazis, displaying patriotism became paramount, so she spent weekends and holidays jetting about to star-studded events to raise money for the British Relief Fund. With the U.S. determined to sidestep another war, support efforts fell to the likes of Fred Astaire, Myrna Loy, and Bridey V.

  Thus I took my first fledging flaps outside my nest. The autonomous act of driving myself to Chernoff’s lodge vivified me, and each passing moon I handed the director thousands of dollars without equivocation. Bridey’s cash advance ran out; prideful like a lad away at university, I asked not for further funds but rather paid Chernoff from my own wages. A boy my age ought to be worrying about pimples and dandruff, not decay! This left nothing to send Church but I was surprised by how little I minded. Not once in a hundred paychecks had he bothered to thank me.

  When Bridey did come home, she and I were no more a misalliance. Rather, we were the Wonder Twins, younger and trimmer each time we toweled off from our respective fountains of youth. Her bedtime chatter revolved around a possible new neck, while I pondered my own frontier—a whole new face. We sighed over the prospects until she fell asleep; after that, I sighed some more. Bridey was five films away from fulfilling her contract and the shooting script of In Our Image, she said, was almost finished. It felt as though our good fortune might never turn.

  On February 29, 1940—Leap Day, a black portent—we attended the twelfth annual Academy Awards, held at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub of the Ambassador Hotel. Bridey had received her third Best Actress nomination, this time for the role of a dethroned, banished, debased, and yet enduringly well-scrubbed princess who falls for the eye-patched ringleader of a band of medieval outlaws. An usher guided us around the indoor palm trees. Clad in a black satin dress and cape flounced with cockerel feathers, Bridey ravened through a field of lilac, juniper, and rose gowns.

  While she entertained well-wishers with her jaded eye-rolls, I fulfilled the arm-candy role for which I’d been trained and taxidermied, quiet and dashing in a stifling tuxedo. We landed at a plum table where we knocked elbows with James Stewart and an absolute doll-face named Judy Garland, who I mentally declothed until her unrelenting cheeriness began to make me ill.

  It was during the naming of Best Original Score that I became aware of an itch. So I scratched it; what could be more banal? Our host, a duck-faced prankster named Bob Hope, yielded the podium to the songster behind The Wizard of Oz. The itch, I realized, came from the Hand; I stopped scratching. The composer’s speech was short, and Mr. Hope proceeded to deliver an Oscar to Walt Disney for some bit of cartooning. The room was dark; I drew close a candle so that I might see the source of my itch. Mr. Disney was done; now Mr. Hope wondered aloud who devised the year’s Best Story?

  My tablemates belched cheer upon the naming of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Perfect timing! I drew back my sleeve by its sterling silver cufflink and brought the Hand to the guttering flame.

  The flesh had buckled inward at the former location of the fishing-hook wound. With horror, I saw that the skin around it had revolted against Chernoff’s chemicals and now shone with a banana-peel blackness. I was rotting. Right there at the goddamned Academy Awards I was falling apart.

  I turned to Bridey but she was groaning along to Mr. Hope’s latest crack. I craned my neck elsewhere for a hallway through which I might escape. What I found instead were film cameras pointed every which way, more than I could tally. Bridey had mentioned this in the limousine, how the ceremony was being filmed for a Warner Brothers newsreel; that was why she had to wear something that would make a splash in black-and-white.

  Ed Mann and his capering clowns were after me again! If I fled, those snitchers would film it, toss it up on a million screens, and this time people would remember. Under the table I hid the Hand, that unpardonable traitor, and grafted onto my whirling head a deranged grin. Face by famous face, the grin was mirrored back, each mouth as wide and red as a slit throat. Before my eyes, beauty became disfigurement. Refinished teeth were primitive stones, stained not with wine but Cro-Magnon blood. A tightened forehead was burnished bone. A pert new nose was the hairy black void of a sow’s snout.

  Frank Capra dropped me a wink—he knew my dirty secret. Mickey Rooney slapped his knee—he’d tell his chums my whole sick story. Bob Hope waggled his long lizard tongue at me and relinquished the podium to Spencer Tracey, who turned the list of Best Actress nominees into a pontiff’s gonging: Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Greta Garbo, Greer Garson, Bridey Valentine. Cryptic names of lesser devils, all of whom howled fealty to their ascendant winner and high priestess, Vivien Leigh—Scarlett O’Hara herself—whose every word of gratitude goaded her frothing minions to orgiastic thrall.

  In single slugs, Bridey downed cocktails, blood-red and piss-yellow and pus-white. Ice rattled; I gasped. This ceremony, or necromancy, whatever it was, was finished, having lurched out ahead of me while I roiled in delirium. I came to life with the Hand tucked beneath my lapel, watching Bridey chant ancient incantations to purring cameras: “Always a Bridey, never a bride, isn’t that right, boys?”

  There!—a dagger of darkness!—a door!—and beyond, the wide-open night! With my unspoiled hand I took Bridey by the elbow but we were blocked by giddy goblins gibbering glorifications regarding performances and realizations. Here in this hippodrome there was no Depression, no drought, no poverty, no war. Bridey they cheek-kissed but me they offered hands for the shaking, their right hands, which meant my right hand, the Hand, was required to meet them.

  I clobbered my way through the crowd, jilting Bridey for a second time, but what else could I do? Outside, a doorman hailed a cab; that cab spat me out at the mansion; there, I took a car and torched rubber for two hours until reaching the lodge. By then it was three in the morning and the mountains were cold and black and probably teeming with trolls. I attacked the door; there was no response. I shattered a window and clambered through it.

  “Chernoff!”

  I bolted down darkened hallways, cradling the Hand to my breast.

  By the time I reached the Hall of Animals, I was hysterical. These jeering abominations were no better than those monsters at the Ambassador! My flesh was in ruin and thus it was ruin I’d spread. I ambushed a polar bear, took a jaw in either hand, and pulled until the b
ottom half broke loose and dry straw erupted from the mouth. I hooted, lashed out with the Hand, and snatched a kudu by an ear. It came down with a thump, its braided horns spearing the belly of a fox; rather than entrails, it spilled sawdust. I swiped the sawdust with my hand and licked it—blood of conquest!—before barreling forth, beating the stuffing out of a tapir, tipping dozens of mounted heads cockeyed, and using a decorative arrowhead to slash a bison hide to ribbons.

  The storm was me, and I was lost within it. After a half hour of ransacking, I spotted Oksana the Brittany Spaniel snoozing unconcerned amid the slaughter. I sank my claws into her neck flab so that I might rip her skin clean off as a magician whips a tablecloth from beneath full place settings.

  A gunshot blasted and the leather chair beside me skidded back ten feet. I looked up and there was Chernoff, his smoking elephant gun quite the accoutrement against his crisp tuxedo. He aimed the gun at me before his face showed recognition. Even then, his rage went unabated.

  “What have you done here? Unhand Oksana or I shoot!”

  I kicked the dog; she glided across the floor like a puck. Chernoff juked it and advanced. I rose to full height and displayed the beslimed cavity of the Hand.

  “What I’ve done? What have you have done, sir?”

  From behind the sight of his gun, Chernoff squinted and frowned.

  “Is only decay. For this you break window? Defile dignity of our friends?”

  “Only decay? Only? I am no dead animal you found in the woods!”

  “But Mr. Finch. You are dead animal. You are in woods.”

  “Take this warning, sir. In seconds I shall ford the distance betwixt us, welcoming any gunshot you wish to contribute, and then, you Soviet scum, I shall play African lion with you. I shall shove my fist, decay and all, down your lying throat.”

  “Is always Tchaikovsky with you, is always boom-boom-boom. Chernoffs are men of honor. Here there is no lie, only simple fact. Your hand, it spoils. The rest of our work, soon it spoils too. Where is the surprise in this? Treated hide cannot live beside untreated. Is obvious to the brain.”

  “Then you must fix it! This is your fault!”

  “Nyet! This failure belongs to you, Mr. Finch. A great many hours we waste on foolishness. Little bit here, Mr. Chernoff, little bit there. This is not what taxidermist does. You wish full preservation? Is fine, is good, is no big deal. But there cannot be more of this pussyfoot!”

  “Then what do we need to do?”

  “Your skin must come off. All of it.”

  My fury, wilded as it was, went cold.

  Chernoff tipped his shotgun at a gorilla that had survived my rampage.

  “Gorilla is lovely, da? You are same as gorilla. One cut and skin comes off in single piece, like pajama. I scoop out abdomen, remove soft matter, replace with stronger material. Is best treatment. You leave here brand-new. You last for centuries. We do this now or we are through. Is your choice.”

  He slanted his body so that chest, shoulders, and gun each pointed the path to the workshop. There awaited the alkali stench that to me smelled of ambrosial dew; there awaited the stanchions from which had dried flaps of my skin, or, as I saw them, clothier racks from which I might be dressed for success.

  While Chernoff cleared his throat and tapped his tuxedo shoe, I imagined the feeling of liberty that would come with being fully peeled. I expect the sentence sends shivers, Reader, but consider it from my perspective. My body was a filthy haversack I was damned to schlepp through always muddier fields, and when Chernoff shucked a piece of it, the fresh air upon me felt new again, how it used to feel when I woke with windows wide and Wilma Sue snoring beside me.

  Chernoff clapped his hands.

  “Forty-eight hours this will take. Many meetings will need rescheduling. Come, we begin.”

  His eyes glinted behind Roosevelt spectacles.

  I shuffled in his direction.

  My path took me past Oksana. Her muzzle was planted into the crotch of a mountain goat. It was indecent, not what the bitch deserved. I lifted my eyes to find a moose, tipped so that its broad antlers were jammed into the mouth of a hyena. Neither would have so bungled combat in life. Behind them stood the hummingbird cabinet, glassless from impact with a thrown anteater. Yet no bird darted for freedom. Such lovely, virtuous animals—Chernoff had been right about that. But also so weak; I’d taken them down without a fight.

  You could reap the skin, the meat, the bones.

  But what of the fear in the heart?

  Is that not what keeps an animal alive?

  I stopped walking; I swayed in place. Chernoff’s brow tightened.

  “We go now. You trust in me, da?”

  Chernoff’s barrages had subdued Hollywood’s most outspoken personalities. But they’d been actors, and what, I ask you, were actors of that era? They were trophies for studios to hoist in the same way the actors hoisted their silly statuettes. Fleeing the Ambassador, I’d dodged a dozen Oscars, and in each caramel gleam I’d recognized my contorted reflection. I, too, had become a trophy for Bridey’s shelf, placed there to indicate the breadth of her conquests. I was likewise to Chernoff, a handsome dead thing for exhibit.

  ’Twas better, concluded I, to rot on one’s own terms.

  True to his stoic character, Chernoff said nothing as I retreated from the Hall of Animals, climbed back through the busted window, and took to the car. I drove and drove, each of my taxidermied parts worming back toward aberrance, until I hit the outskirts of Los Angeles. There I jackknifed the vehicle to a curb, rear-ending a parked Studebaker and dinging a new gadget called a parking meter.

  I deserted the sweltry leather chamber and stalked the lonesome streets until high-wattage street signs became tamed by the brighter hues of the rising day. The more dilapidated a cross-street looked, the quicker I took it, until I trod among my own people: not the beautiful and celebrated, but the leprous and depraved.

  I pointed at the glimmer of sun and accused it.

  “Won’t you remove me from this Sodom?!”

  My plea smacked about the concrete. When it relented, it did so to a jaunty tune crooned by a pitchless singer nevertheless pleased by his rendition. The song I recognized at once as “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”; I recognized the singer, too. It did not much surprise me that it was the same bum I’d stumbled upon enjoying an alley crap just after my arrival in L.A.

  He, at least, had gone unchanged by time’s passage. He was still larded in squalid rags and quaggy with sores, and I took solace in his dogged durability. He held to life like a parasite, repellent in a town built on the backs of beauties, and unapologetic about sucking from it what blood he needed.

  My smile perturbed him. His song went skeptical.

  “Tra la la la . . . la?”

  If only I’d owned a complete set of Variety, that most sumptuous of toilet papers, to gift him! For the scuffling wretch had done me a service, reminding me that I’d once known a man like him, whose mind and body had been so crippled that he’d been forced to begin anew. His name was Burt Churchwell, and I castigated myself for having forsaken him. He’d saved my soul before, so why not again? Yes, the soul—that jejune belief. I hoped it might yet be tucked away inside me, that evasive thing Dr. Leather had tried to unearth and Chernoff had wanted to toss into the trash with the rest of the rubbish.

  XIII.

  WRITING HAD FRIED ME INSIDE many a pot of boiling oil o’er the decades. Is it any wonder I quailed upon penning this most delicate of summonses? After finding Church’s old phone number was disconnected, I lived out a scene from Bridey’s script, shredding draft after draft of a letter, each page symbolic of calendars’ worths of wasted time. At the end of the day, not to mention wit, I mailed Church not an apologia but a transferrable plane ticket: first-class, one-way, New York to Los Angeles.

  All that was left to do was tread wate
r in hopes of staying afloat with Bridey long enough for Church to find me. During those ten months of lies, Bridey added to the household such gadgetry as a “television” and a bug repellant in the form of an “aerosol spray,” but these were flaccid distractions. Bridey had disparaged my decision to suspend taxidermic therapy, and after learning from Mercy St. Johns how I’d sacked Chernoff’s “stuffed animals,” she accused me of undermining the future of In Our Image. I believed only two things prevented her from kicking me out: one, her schedule—she’d reach film number twenty-five before year’s end—and two, the thought of me, the world’s strangest thing, being in another collector’s museum.

  I feared the worst for Church. What if he’d been arrested as part of the Bonus Army and never released from jail, and every cent I’d mailed had been pocketed by the Chinatown landlord? Low were my spirits that day in December when the butler found me in the library and announced that I had a visitor. I sprinted across miles of mansion to arrive at the eastern drawing room, where a man stood examining a pleasant series of framed medical sketches detailing the Mesolithic skull-drilling process of trepanation.

  This was no champion of the gridiron and battlefield. Neither was it the scrapper with whom I’d ridden out the boom and bust of the Twenties. This fellow here was old, with thin, graying hair and a back so bent it took him five seconds to turn around with the help of a cane. He wore a beard to effect a comb-over of sorts across the crater in his cheek. It was Church, all right, but a variant I’d never imagined: bone-thin here, lard-soft there, and routed with wrinkles, particularly when he grinned.

  “Dang,” said he. “You don’t ever change, do you?”

  A chirping laugh fluted up from lungs that had never satisfactorily healed. The greeting was, in fact, rather funny. Me, not change? What had I done in this ersatz Shangri-La but change? I extended my hand, which had reassumed its pre-taxidermic smutch. Church’s hand, meanwhile, was draped in loose skin and freckled with age. But he was Midwestern, not Californian; he would not have blanched had I resembled a pile of hamburger.